Adsense Revenue Sharing Sites - Tips and tricks

How to track your adsense clicks and use them to make more money through adsense?

2011-04-17T15:38:00.000-07:00

In the world of blogging, especially in the adsense revenue sharing websites, it is of utmost importance to extract the maximum out of a strategy that works for you rather than trying to make the non-working strategy or a strategy that yields less work. Though there aren’t any official statistics for this one, but I’ll try to convince you with my my observation and justification in this matter.

For a adsense revenue sharing site, we can categorize the traffic as follows:

Members with adsense associated to the revenue sharing site
Newly joined members of the revenue sharing site who don’t have adsense for the first 6 months*
Those who come from search engines like Google, yahoo, bing, etc. and other sources.

(*The 6 month restriction in point 2 is put by Google for new adsense applications which come through the revenue sharing site specifically for residents of some countries like India and China)

It has been observed that those who get adsense account approved are most of the times reluctant to click on any ads. This is because they are supposed to avoid clicking on their "own" ads anywhere, be it their personal blog, website or the revenue sharing sites. Now this mind frame continues and when they see Google ads on other articles or websites, the resistance they have developed internally to avoid clicking on their own ad continues there as well (till a certain level of course). Even if they really find it irresistible to click on the ads, some would still prefer to Google search the product to find more information instead of clicking on the ad (There will also be some who will break the resistance barrier, think once if the ad is their or not and click on the ad). This mind frame is developed because they have got adsense approved after good amount of efforts and don’t want to risk losing it. The 1st category above mostly falls under this. The CTR (click through ratio) is really less in this case.

The 2nd category is the newly joined members of a revenue sharing site which allows for adsense signups through them. Many of them don’t have adsense and want to get adsense within 6 months and start earning. And while browsing for ways to get adsense, they might have come across posts of users getting banned by adsense, click fraud issues, etc. Hence even these people start developing ad-phobia (new term coined by me ;)). Though the CTR is more than the above category for this set of people, it is still less.

Now, in case of the 3rd category which is the traffic coming mainly from search engines, these are people who are looking for information/resources. Now some of these might have an adsense account and ad-phobia applies to them as well, but we can safely assume that we will get a good mix of people from the search engine and other sources. Of course, it depends on the topic as well. But in general, these are the people who have already clicked on a search engine result and are likely to click on an ad which directs them towards the information they are looking for. They are in a sort of click-flow (another term coined by me!). Isn’t it true that many a times, we keep navigating from one article to a link on that article and so on only to find large number of tabs open in our browser. Let me explain this through another example. It is something like when you take out a credit card to purchase something online, after purchasing that, oh wait! You see another brilliant product/service. There is a good chance that you will purchase this as well since you are on a buying spree. This is the category from which a very high CTR can be obtained.

While, in spite of the above, you might observe that your earnings are more from the revenue sharing site members than from search engine visitors (it is difficult to get to the first page after all). This is because, out of 100, if you get 90 members from the revenue sharing site get 5 clicks and 10 from search engine get 2 clicks, you are still getting more clicks from the revenue sharing site members, but what I’m talking about here is the conversion ratio which is 5/90 = 5.56% in case of revenue sharing site members traffic and 2/10 = 20% in case of search engine traffic. You would want to spend more efforts in getting traffic from where you're having a better conversion ratio or a click through rate(CTR).

This can further be categorized on a case by case basis. For instance, consider the target traffic for that particular revenue sharing site. The adsense revenue sharing site IndiaStudyChannel gets major amount of traffic from Indian youth, so in this case, the characteristics of youth towards ads will need to be taken into consideration. If you use IndiaStudyChannel, you might want to see a customized post for ISC: "How to track the set of people who click on your ads and increase their reach?"

While all the above is not officially proved anywhere and there is a fair chance you might find that it is not the case with your articles. To check this for yourself, you can use the “Recently came from” feature of statcounter or referrers in Google analytics (Do integrate an analytics software if you don't have one). This should give you a good amount of information about your visitors.

Ad coverage - How many adsense ads on your site are you actually getting?

2011-04-16T14:00:00.000-07:00

If you are using adsense on your site, whenever you page loads, a request for ad is sent to adsense. Ideally, adsense will respond with the ad but sometimes, it is not able to fulfill this request. In such cases, a blank space or default ad might be shown in that space. This percentage of ad requests actually fulfilled by adsense is called “ad coverage”.

The following is a step by step tutorial that will guide you to check your adsense ad coverage for corresponding page views for any selected time period.
Please follow these steps:

Login to your google adsense account.
Click on the “Performance reports” circled in red in the image below.

Click the “Columns” dropdown list on the right hand side of the page circled in red.

Select the radio button “Ad requests”

Click Apply

Select the time period for which you want to see the ad coverage(It can be anything from previous day to any arbitrary time range from the day your adsense account was created)

You would be able to see the Ad coverage in a table.

Now that you know how to check your ad coverage, you can use this to see how your own site or various revenue sharing sites that you are using perform on this parameter. The impact of this can be tremendous which has been discussed in this post.

Best adsense sharing site - how to select one that will get most revenue for you?

2011-04-16T13:31:00.000-07:00

There exist more than 100 adsense revenue sharing sites and evaluating each and every one individually might be a bit difficult. Following are some widely known parameters against which you should evaluate the adsense revenue sharing site like:

Page rank
Traffic (generally coincides with pagerank)
Niche (if there is some particular domain/field of your interest for which there exists a community)
% revenue share (How much the site is sharing with its members? Is the sharing lifelong?)
Is it free to join?
Are there any more avenues for earning apart from adsense revenue share?
Do you retain the right to your articles? (Are you allowed to delete or republish your article if you want to?)
Does it provide me some statistics to how my articles are performing or does it allow to integrate with statcounter or google analytics?
Does the site allow you to place back links to your own websites/blogs or affiliate links? Is the backlink do follow or no follow? (Unfortunately, some sites allow a no follow back link which google doesn't count as a back link and you don't get any benefit in google's eyes.)
Does the site show ads to its own members? (Like Flixya doesn't and you miss out a lot of revenue there!)
The community (How helping is the community? Are they willing to help out each other?)
A co-operative administration (New questions come up all the time. Is the administration co-operative enough?)

But one parameter which is mostly missed out by many is the "Ad coverage" that the site gets. Though mostly it depends on the resource that it should be keyword optimized, should use keywords in demand by the advertisers etc. but the site also happens to be a parameter. Like if it is a very popular site, some advertisers will specifically configure their ads to appear on that site (Yes, Google Adwords has provision for that). While if there is a site which gets traffic mainly from the set of people that might not be the target customers for advertisers, he might as well block those sites from showing his ads.

One bottleneck here is that unlike the above widely accepted parameters, "Ad coverage" for sites is not easily available or rather, it is actually different for different types of resources/articles. So you might have to check them individually for yourself and for your niche of articles. In either case, it is always worth to keep a track of these statistics.

This in fact should be a major consideration while considering the % share given by the revenue sharing site. For example, if the site gives 90% revenue share but the ad coverage you are getting there is just 50% (weird but trust me, it happens), then effectively you are getting just 45% times your ad shown or bluntly put, 45% share! And then, there is another site which has a pretty good ad coverage of about 95% because of its popularity but gives just a 60% share (which accounts to 57% effectively), then it is sort of obvious now as to which site will be best for you.

With initial revenue share numbers as different as 100% and 60%, it boils down to 45% and 57% and dramatically reverses the earning trend that you might actually observe as compared to what you expected.

Many a times, it might be difficult to get the best of all the parameters. Optimizing the major ones for you might be the best bet!

You might like this post How to Bookmark on Revenue Sharing Sites like SheToldMe.

How to bookmark on social bookmarking sites to earn more money? [Bookmarking secrets revealed]

2011-04-16T13:18:00.000-07:00

While most of us use the social bookmarking site SheToleMe(Read this if you want to know more about social bookmarking or SheToldMe) for back links and a little of adsense that we might passively earn in the process. But even this little of adsense can be be optimized to reap greater benefits and hence the corresponding adsense revenue share earnings!

I know what you might be thinking, "What? Do you think I don't even know bookmarking?". You surely know bookmarking, but it's worth learning how to bookmark more efficiently. Social bookmarking isn't your normal browser bookmarking where you just hit the star and are ready to move on. And if you are doing that, you are missing out a lot of traffic and earnings simultaneously. The description that you give for the bookmarks should be used efficiently.

"So is it that difficult a process to be researched upon like when writing an article?" - It would have been without access to some tools but fortunately Google does most of the work for you. What you need to do is just pick a set of words or phrases suggested by Google which suits the article/blog and make sentences out of those. Remember "Fill in the blanks" from our school days? Even if you don't, it's pretty simple if you have fairly descent amount of knowledge of English. Following are the steps you need to follow:

Open the link: https://adwords.google.co.in/select/KeywordToolExternal
Enter the link url in the text box "Website" shown in the snippet below:

Hit the search button

You will get a list of keywords

Select the column "Estimated Avg. CPC" as shown in the image.

Sort the results using the column Estimated Avg. CPC

You'll get the list of most highly paid keywords that might be suitable for the entered website url.

Tada! Now just find a good combination of keywords that can be used for the url you're bookmarking and construct sentenced to fit the description. A good combination should include a high value for both Search and CPC.

Do you think I use this technique to come up with titles for the posts as well? Let me know through comments below :)